HPC Training

NICS training efforts are designed to provide the necessary background for a wide range of current and prospective users for greater proficiency on a variety of topics in HPC. NICS provides the following:

Notification of upcoming events

Regularly scheduled workshops and seminars on topics in HPC hosted at the center or off-site

Cyberinfrastructure Tutor

CI-Tutor is hosted by the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. It offers a number of self-paced tutorials covering topics in high-performance computing such as multi-core performance, performance tuning, large-scale parallel simulation, scientific visualization, and debugging. The tutorials are available free to everyone and can be accessed by registering and creating a login. To see a listing of the tutorials offered, go to the CI-Tutor course catalog. To login and take a course, go to the CI-Tutor homepage. Links to the tutorials are also available from the XSEDE User Portal Online Training web page.

These self-paced courses include:

Parallel Computing Explained

Introduction to MPI

Introduction to OpenMP

Debugging Serial and Parallel Codes

Introduction to Multi-core Performance

Parallel Numerical Libraries

Using the Lustre File System

Virtual School of Computational Science and Engineering (VSCSE)

NICS hosted a Summer School video classroom for the VSCSE school during the summers of 2009, 2010 and 2011. Instructors from NICS (and its sister DOE center OLCF) provided a portion content and instructors for each of these summer school events. NICS’ Jim Ferguson served on the Program Committee in ’09 and ’10, and was Program Chair in 2011. For more on VSCSE events, see VSCSE website

The Virtual School of Computational Science and Engineering (VSCSE) helps graduate students, post-docs and young professionals from all disciplines and institutions across the country gain the skills they need to use advanced computational resources to advance their research.

Helpful NICS Documentation

NICS User Support has created several web pages with examples and information concerning many questions users commonly encounter.

Introductory Podcasts

NICS has developed short introductory podcasts to provide users with an introductory material users may learn by watching these videos.

XSEDE Training Calendar

XSEDE offers training classes to teach users how to maximize their productivity and impact in using the XSEDE services. The training classes focus on systems and software supported by the XSEDE Service Providers, covering programming principles and techniques for using resources and services effectively. Training classes are offered in high performance computing, visualization, data management, distributed and grid computing, science gateways, and more.
Current and potential XSEDE users should review the Course Calendar for a list of upcoming training courses at XSEDE Sites. The calendar provides link to the course descriptions and for requesting to be enrolled in the classes. Requests for new or additional training class offerings may be submitted via this user portal.

HPC University

The HPC University (HPCU) is a virtual organization whose primary goal is to provide a cohesive, persistent, and sustainable on-line environment to share educational and training materials for a continuum of high performance computing environments that span desktop computing capabilities to the highest-end of computing facilities offered by HPC centers.

Past Events

NICS keeps the archive of past training events, which may contain internal, as well as external links. Archives may contain video (Windows Media-capable viewer necessary) and PowerPoint or PDF slides from presentations.